


Always Chosen

by GretchenSinister



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2020-04-23 05:39:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19144666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: Original Prompt: "Basically Pitch finds out about Jack’s origin and decides that the best way to make sure his plan never failed is to make sure Jack never died, somehow.Paradoxes abound!"Do I know how Pitch went back in time? No.But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the boy who would have been Jack Frost still had to die sometime, in some other winter, and now Pitch is facing someone else in the Tooth Palace.





	Always Chosen

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr on 11/25/2015.

“I know you,” the old man says, staring at Pitch with narrowed eyes.  
  
The colors of the Tooth Palace seem to fade away for Pitch as his gaze fixes on the being before him, the being that  _shouldn’t_  be here,  _can’t_  be here, not after all the steps he had taken to prevent just this scene.  
  
“Yes, I know you well,” the man says again. “Maybe I’ve never seen you before, but,” he waves a bony, wrinkled hand through the air gently, “the feeling is the same. You’re the one who’s warned me, time and time again. I remember the first time. You warned me away from thin ice, one late-winter day. Who knows what might have happened if you hadn’t? Well. Pretty easy to see that, a few years on. I probably would have fallen through and drowned. My sister and I had never seen winter like we had that year. We didn’t know how to deal with ice.”  
  
He smiles, and the lines around his eyes and mouth make his face look much like cracked ice itself. “I’ve gotten better, since then,” he says, tapping his walking stick lightly against the tiles of the palace, making delicate lines of frost spiral out along the floor.  
  
“No,” Pitch says. “No, this cannot be!  _You_  cannot be!”  
  
The old man laughs, and it’s not the merry, clear sound Pitch remembers from another world, but it used to be. Of course it used to be. Decades made it deeper, decades made it wiser, decades touched it with the bitterness of winter winds. “I admit this wasn’t any of the afterlives I was expecting,” he says. “Apparently, there’s still a lot of work for me to get done. Problems to solve, that sort of thing. I don’t mind it, really. I was never the most sober and shining individual, and I prefer being cold, when considering other, so-far unconfirmed, options. And if this is a halfway point”—he shrugs—“I always did try to be good to children, my own and everybody’s. And it seems like now I’ve been offered the opportunity to do that indefinitely. It all works out, doesn’t it? Well. Maybe not with men like you. I understand that you’re one of the big problems that needs solving right now. Even if you saved me once or twice, doesn’t seem like you’re in the business anymore, are you?”  
  
Pitch can’t even react to the insult of being called a mere man.  _This_  old man…how could Pitch have known? How could he have guessed? How could he have  _not_?  
  
Whatever the moon had seen in Jack as a boy, it had remained throughout his long life. Ordinary as he had seemed, he had still been chosen. And now he isn’t Jack Frost. Jack was a laughing boy, Jack was all mischief, Jack could be goaded into acting quickly on his emotions. The man before him has a lifetime of experience behind him. He had learned to think, and wait. He had become cannier, colder.  
  
He stands before Pitch with his long white beard and long white hair, still shining brightly like Frost’s had. His eyes are that same piercing blue. He’s still thin, but he almost seems gaunt, now. He’s taller than Frost had been, and his clothes are as fine as the fashion would have it, all in blue and silver, from the year when he must have died. No sweatshirt for this man. No flighty changes like that. He has soft brown boots, and now, he carries not a shepherd’s crook but a heavy walking stick.  
  
Pitch considers that he might not be able to break it over his knee. He considers also that it’s too late to stop now.  
  
“No, indeed, Old Man Winter,” Pitch says. “But with your blizzards, I’d say you weren’t, either. With everything you’ve done, do you really think you have a right to protect the children?” 


End file.
